Who's Better? Who's Best? Pairwise Deep Ranking for Skill Determination

We present a method for assessing skill from video, applicable to a variety of tasks, ranging from surgery to drawing and rolling pizza dough. We formulate the problem as pairwise (who's better?) and overall (who's best?) ranking of video collections, using supervised deep ranking. We propose a novel loss function that learns discriminative features when a pair of videos exhibit variance in skill, and learns shared features when a pair of videos exhibit comparable skill levels. Results demonstrate our method is applicable across tasks, with the percentage of correctly ordered pairs of videos ranging from 70% to 83% for four datasets. We demonstrate the robustness of our approach via sensitivity analysis of its parameters. We see this work as effort toward the automated organization of how-to video collections and overall, generic skill determination in video.Comment: CVPR 201

A Cognitive Robot Control Architecture for Autonomous Execution of Surgical Tasks

The research on medical robotics is starting to address the autonomous execution of surgical tasks, without effective intervention of humans apart from supervision and task configuration. This paper addresses the complete automation of a surgical robot by combining advanced sensing, cognition and control capabilities, developed according to rigorous assessment of surgical require- ments, formal specification of robotic system behavior and software design and implementation based on solid tools and frame- works. In particular, the paper focuses on the cognitive control architecture and its development process, based on formal modeling and verification methods as best practices to ensure safe and reliable behavior. Full implementation of the proposed architecture has been tested on an experimental setup including a novel robot specifically designed for surgical applications, but adaptable to different selected tasks (i.e. needle insertion, wound suturing)

Motivation as a predictor of dental students’ affective and behavioral outcomes: Does the quality of motivation matter?

Since the motivation to study and engage in academic activities plays a key role in students’ learning experience and well-being, gaining a better understanding of dental students’ motivations can help educators implement interventions to support students’ optimal motivations. The aim of this study, grounded in self-determination theory, was to determine the predictive role of different types of motivation (autonomous motivation, controlled motivation, and amotivation) in the affective and behavioral outcomes of dental students. Amotivation is the absence of drive to pursue an activity due to a failure to establish relationships between activity and behavior; controlled motivation involves behaving under external pressure or demands; and autonomous motivation is an internalized behavior with a full sense of volition, interest, choice, and self-determination. A cross-sectional correlational study was conducted in 2016, in which 924 students (90.2% response rate) from years one to six agreed to participate, granting permission to access their current GPAs and completing four self-reported questionnaires on academic motivation, study strategies, vitality, and self-esteem. The results showed that self-determined motivation (i.e., autonomous over controlled motivation) was positively associated with vitality, self-esteem, and deep study strategies and negatively associated with surface study strategies. The contrary results were found for amotivation. In the motivational model, deep study strategies showed a positive association with students’ academic performance. Contrary results were found for surface study strategies. This study extends understanding of the differentiation of motivation based on its quality types and suggests that being motivated does not necessarily lead to positive educational outcomes. Autonomous motivation, in contrast to controlled motivation and amotivation, should be supported to benefit students with regard to their approaches to learning and well-being since it can promote students’ vitality, self-esteem, deep over surface study strategies, and enhanced academic performance